


Hold Me Fast

by Shachaai



Category: Hannibal Extended Universe - Fandom, King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Alpha Tristan, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Fae & Fairies, Fix-It of Sorts, Folklore, Frequent References to Canonical Character Death(s), Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mpreg, Omega Galahad, Post-Canon, Unplanned Pregnancy, or: on the many problems arising from Tristan being both a hot stud and making a handsome corpse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26257720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: Tristan’s body disappears from the field after the battle, and no-one can find it -him-  anywhere. Galahad must now deal with the loss of his mate without even a grave to grieve over - and an unplanned-for babe growing in his belly.The pregnancy, at least, gives Galahad something to live for, and, as winter thaws to spring and bleeds into a sultry summer, the chance to find the answers for what happened to Tristan - and whether Galahad can bring his alpha home again.
Relationships: Galahad/Tristan (King Arthur 2004), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 37
Collections: #SummertimeSlick





	Hold Me Fast

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this, realised about partway through that I was basically writing a Tam Lin AU, and just leant into it. I also have a(n unpublished) non-a/b/o Tristhad WIP that’s pretty damn similar to this, because I shook the magical plotbunny tree and all it wanted to throw down on me was mysticism and faeries.  
> In medieval British, French and Irish literature, the line(s) between Death, Faerie, and the Otherworld can be quite blurry. Sometimes one is just a very poetic metaphor for another, but sometimes these places are physical, and can be reached from the ‘real world’ by walking into the mist, stepping into fae woods and waters, or neglecting to avert your eyes when something unusual sweeps by.  
> This _is_ written to fit the SumertimeSlick prompts of Mpreg and Summer Nights (with a dash of True Mates), but, uh, it does take a little while for that to become apparent (because most of the later events of the movie take place in the _snow_ ).

They pull their weapons and armour from the wagon together and dress side by side, sliding leather through buckles and tying down straps with ease born of long practice.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Galahad asks Tristan, the words escaping him like they know they will never have the chance to be asked again.

The sound of the Saxon army in the distance has flooded Galahad’s chest with a kind of strange, wild anticipation rather than fear, but Tristan and he  _ had _ agreed on plans very different to the course of action they’re about to embark upon only last night. No matter who or what else they left behind them, the plan had been for them to head south together with the rest of the fleeing Britons and departing Roman army, and then east across the straits. To their new life together. A new home.

One look shared between them and their brothers on the march seems to have put a hold on that, and Galahad has to know- has to have this matter clear between Tristan and him, for Galahad cannot and will not ride into a fool’s battle without - at least - the other half of his heart beside him.

“We’re free men now,” he says, and steps in close to Tristan to take comfort from the heat of his alpha’s body, breathing in deeply Tristan’s scent of iron and cedar woods, rainwater, bird feathers and musk. Sweat and leather, apples horse. Galahad would know him blind. “We’re not beholden to this island, these people.”

Or Arthur, behind them.

Tristan’s eyes are soft on Galahad, his hand gentle when it lifts to touch the still-exposed skin of Galahad’s throat. The hard rush of Galahad’s pulse there in response to the touch of his alpha and chosen mate, Tristan’s grip laid secure in the place he has - long-since and  _ soon -  _ promised Galahad his teeth. “Are you asking me, or yourself?”

“At this point, I’m asking both of us.” Galahad leans into his lover’s hand, ducking his head until Tristan lifts his thumb enough for Galahad to drag against his mouth as a kiss. “Where you go, I go. Where I go, you go. Always.”

“And so, together, we go around in circles,” Tristan teases him, huffing out a laugh when one of Galahad’s omega fangs catches on his thumb with a reproachful nip. A bead of blood blooms, sweet with life, iron and cedar, and is licked away with a quick swipe of Galahad’s tongue.

“That’s just you, chasing my ass.” 

Tristan’s laughter, this time, is a rumbling thing, and he hauls Galahad in to nuzzle against him, dragging his mouth, his cheek and nose against Galahad’s face and throat and hair to mark him with his scent, to kiss Galahad until Galahad’s cheeks stretch sore from smiling, from scent-marking Tristan in return between attempts to catch Tristan’s errant mouth with his own. As often as not, he gets Tristan’s  _ hair,  _ little carved beads and bones clacking against each other, tied up in the braids and strands.

They’re going to do this, Galahad already knows. They’re going to do this together. They’ve both already decided, and already know what the other one has decided as well.

They’re going to part in just a little while, and finish donning their armour. Then they’re going to get on their horses again to ride back the way they’ve come, all to go into an incredibly dangerous battle where the odds are greatly against them against a horde of murderous Saxons. To fight, and potentially die, on the same side as the Woads that they’ve spent the past fifteen years trying to kill before the Woads managed to kill  _ them. _

Tristan has already loosed his beloved hawk, Yseult freed again to the open skies.

For Arthur.

And for what is right.

Galahad groans, and turns his clutching fingers and face into Tristan’s breastplate. Tristan smells like Galahad now, again, and there is reassurance in that even when the world around them goes mad. “Did we pay for our papers with our sanity?”

Tristan’s chest rises and falls with a sigh beneath Galahad, and his lips press to Galahad’s curls. “I promised you the horizon.” There is regret there, in his voice.

Galahad grumbles his own sigh as well - Tristan shouldn’t be carrying regrets alone. “The nice thing about the horizon, I’ve found, is that it rarely disappears. It’ll wait until we can go after it together.” He lifts his face, demanding without demanding Tristan’s next kiss upon his mouth. A promise between them, given and kept. “What’s one more battle between then and now?”

“I thought I was going after your ass, not the horizon?” Tristan asks him, amused but obliging him.

Reproachfully, Galahad tugs on his nearest braid. “My ass will be disappearing over the horizon without you if you’re not careful.”

“Such kind cruelty you possess: my last sight of you will truly be your best feature.”

Galahad twirls the braid more securely around his fingers, and tugs it a little harder. “If you think you have the time to spare for jokes, you have time to use your mouth for better things.”

Battles do not wait for long, not even for lovers, and, nearby, Galahad can hear that their brother-knights have almost finished with their own preparations for the field.

So Tristan kisses him, because that is what they both want and both feel, and both need the chance to wrap their arms around each other in this scant lull between insanities: their eyes closed to the world, Galahad’s fingers in Tristan’s tousled hair, Tristan’s arms like a shield around his waist. For as long as they can.

“Stay with me,” Tristan breathes against his mouth. His eyelashes, and the strands of his dangling hair, brush Galahad’s cheeks like ticklish butterflies, like the evocation of a thousand sleepy mornings in the peace of their own bed: full of nuzzling, bedhead, and butterfly kisses.

Galahad’s stomach swoops and soars. “Where else would I go?”

* * *

Tristan’s body disappears from the field after the battle, and no-one can find it -  _ him -  _ anywhere. His surviving brothers scour the field for him thrice and Galahad thrice more again before they begin searching amongst the already-gathered dead of their allies, and it is only the black fall of night that ends their efforts for the day. There is no use in looking for Tristan’s body again until morning comes; even a beloved friend can be mistaken for a stranger in the flicker of torchlight, faces made uncertain by shadows, and they are, all of them, in need of rest, exhausted from the fight, wounded and grieving deeply. Bors had taken a spear to the back, Gawain an arrow to the arm, and Lancelot’s corpse speaks loudly of itself and the empty space where Tristan’s should lie beside it.

Arthur is stricken in the soul, blaming himself for the hurt and loss of his knights - and torn particularly over Lancelot, who had been his lover long before the two of them had expanded their unspoken bond to include the Wo- _ Pict  _ omega _ ,  _ Guinevere. That Galahad has lost a lover - a  _ mate -  _ as well only compounds Arthur’s sorrow, and then to  _ lose Tristan’s body... _

They had all looked away, for scant moments it had felt like, to help tend to Lancelot, and when they had looked back for Tristan...

Galahad, alone, persists in his search for Tristan into the night - right up to the point Bors and Gawain realise the grieving idiot isn’t in his cot where they had left him, and go out once more, freshly bandaged, among the dead to try and bring him to his senses. They really should have expected something like this, Galahad is infamous for his stupid decisions, but Galahad had managed to sneak out quietly and their hours had been filled with more immediately pressing and painful distractions.

The cold of the night wind whistles keenly in the hollow of their chests and digs fresh daggers into their new wounds. The light of their torch bobs and dips wildly in Bors’ hand as Bors curses with every step they take that jostles his back - which is to say, every step of the way.

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“You’re not going to kill him,” Gawain grouses back, though he is similarly displeased with Galahad for making them embark upon this trek. One arm bound up in a sling and his whole side throbbing, he wants the warm oblivion of his own bed, his small private space to sleep and ache and grieve.

“Just  _ watch  _ me,” Bors growls, and kicks at a corpse-rat that has come too close to sniffing in the light by his feet. “Get!”

The mud of the battlefield has been churned by the feet and hooves of two armies, and now it is a dangerous place full of stiff, slowly-freezing peaks and sudden hollows that are treacherous to stumbling feet in the darkness. The muscles of Gawain’s injured arm and shoulder  _ shriek _ when the wind cuts at him too sharply, white pain bursting behind his eyelids when he puts his foot in a dip and almost stumbles arse-over-tit into a mound of bloody grass.

Bors catches him before he can hit the dirt, but the sudden stumble-lunge jars both their wounds and sets them both off into a series of heartfelt oaths cursing the night, the field, the cold,  _ fucking  _ Saxons and -

The oaths die when they both realise neither of them can curse Galahad. Though, if Bors doesn’t wring the young knight’s neck first, Gawain is definitely going to tie Galahad to his damn cot so they can all get some rest before morning without having to worry that  _ another  _ one of their brothers is going to get himself killed - by sheer stupidity alone, this time, if the cold doesn’t get Galahad first.

The wind really is bitter, deterring all but the most warmly-wrapped and foolhardy of looters turning over the Saxon corpses. The distant light of their scattered torches jerk and weave about the dark field around Bors and Gawain like the spirit lights of this island’s gods - and among them is Galahad, kneeling alone on the cold ground in the same place where they had gathered Tristan and Lancelot’s bodies together earlier in the day, guttering torch planted askew in the earth beside him.

Folded over his own lap, keening quietly over a broken heart.

Bors and Gawain, catching sight of him and finally realising the thin, high lament in the air around them had been their omega brother’s grief rather than just the wind, draw to an awkward, stumbling halt a few feet away. Glad to have found him, but unsure what to  _ do  _ with him now they have: comfort, berate?

The Roman army takes no women or omegas amongst its legionnaires. Citizens of the Empire may only sign up as soldiers after the presentation of their secondary gender, and only alpha and beta men are accepted.

Boys taken as auxiliaries, on the other hand, are plucked up young, often before an individual’s presentation as much as after. There are alpha, beta  _ and  _ omega men amongst Rome’s auxiliary troops as a result - and thus a higher tendency for the men to couple off amongst themselves, sometimes as mates.

However, a Roman soldier is forbidden from taking a mate. They can bite others outside the army, yes, there is very little to stop that unless someone puts in a formal complaint, but a soldier is forbidden from  _ receiving  _ a bonding mark, completing the circle between a bonded pair. Those caught breaking the rules are fined, flogged and parted from one another - by time and distance, if the superior in charge of punishment is kind, or by death, if he is not.

Arthur and Lancelot hadn’t exchanged bites, nor have Bors and Vanora.

Galahad has no bonding mark, nor had he given one to Tristan. The two of them had been mates in all but name and bite regardless, sharing food, blanket and hardships, drawn to one another from first sight, first smell, first meeting. Despite Galahad being nought more than an unpresented mop of dark curls, wide eyes, and sharp kneecaps at the time, and Tristan an unimpressed, aloof fledgling alpha.

They had looked at no other since then, and their brothers had spoken nothing of it. It had surprised no-one that Galahad, like Lancelot before him, had presented as omega a few years later and gained the gleam of gold in his eyes - but even had he turned out to be an alpha or beta, their brothers would have guarded their relationship from the likes of sodding  _ Rome. _

In Sarmatia, they describe such mates as being born of the same flame. The Romans call them fated ones, and the Britons, mirrors of the soul. Blessed by the spirits and gods. Mates that find each other and somehow  _ know  _ one another as well as they know themselves, loving each other fiercely and instinctively.

Often dying within a few months of one another.

On the ground, Galahad still has ash and blood upon his hands, smears of black and grey and red seared with sweat and tears across his face. Gawain can taste the tar-smoke of the fires that had been lit earlier on the battlefield on the back of his tongue, something bitter and sour that mingles with the dense blanket of  _ devastation _ that presses down on Galahad’s shoulder, turning the scent of the air around him.

What do you say to someone who has lost their heart, and doesn’t even have a sign of it now to grieve over?

“...Galahad,” Gawain manages at last, the word struggling up past the thickness gathered in his throat. Some of it is grief, some horror at his own realisation, and a great deal of it is shame: they have done Galahad a great disservice by leaving him alone after his mate has died.

They have done Galahad a great, great disservice - a great  _ cruelty -  _ for leaving him alone, for expecting him to recover from Tristan’s death like Tristan was merely a brother-knight to him and not born of the same fire as him, the other half of Galahad’s heart and soul.

If Bors shares even an inkling of Gawain’s sudden understanding, he doesn’t show it.

“When we stick you in your bed, you should damn well  _ stay  _ there!” Bors stomps forwards the last few feet to Galahad, his outright ire faded into more general grouchiness by the state of their youngest brother. Galahad’s cry has tapered off with their approach, but the air around them stinks of iron-blood and omega distress. “‘Les you think we  _ like  _ getting our balls frozen off?”

“Vanora might appreciate the reprieve,” Gawain quips without thinking - and then completely ignores Bors’ stink-eye when the joke brings out the wet gurgle of Galahad’s laugh.

“I found his dagger,” Galahad says thickly, straightening just enough so that he can unfold his fingers where they are clenched around his heart, lifting up the precious item he had been clutching there to show his brothers. Torchlight finds the wet tracks on Galahad’s cheeks, and Gawain politely allows his gaze to settle on the blade, on the shadows around them, instead. “I gave it to him.”

There is no need to say who  _ he  _ is.

The dagger is still stained with blood and dirt from use in battle and then lying in the mud, but Gawain recognises it. The blade is a sharp thing, and the handle bound to it with leather is a piece of walrus ivory he recalls Galahad slaving over the year before to carve into the grip of Tristan’s hand.

Tristan had always gone into battle with that dagger tucked up against his breast.

“He had this in his hand,” says Galahad, and lifts his gaze at last to look from Bors to Gawain and back again, brother to brother to brother, lost between them and searching for answers, mate, meaning. His voice is plaintive, sounding young in his grieving confusion. “He had this in his hand when we brought him here; I  _ saw  _ it. And now this is all they’ve left of him.”

“He was here,” Gawain says, and reaches out to clasp Galahad’s shoulder with his uninjured hand, trying to offer what little comfort he can. He doesn’t know what has become of Tristan’s body, but he  _ does  _ know that Tristan’s spirit will hound him for the rest of his days unless Galahad is cared for.

Galahad is still among the living, here and present before them - and cold as snow under Gawain’s hand, too wrapped up in his sorrow to even realise that he’s shivering.

“Where’s your cloak?” Gawain asks him, only for Galahad to look at him blankly. Of course. “Bors, give him your cloak.”

Bors splutters. “Why do  _ I  _ have to give him my cloak?  _ You  _ give him your cloak!”

“You want to stand out here in the cold for another hour whilst I try and get mine off with only one arm, and a sling tied on top of it in numerous shitty knots besides?”

Bors shoves their torch into Gawain’s fumbling grip before sweeping off his cloak, bundling it around the kneeling knight’s shoulders and hauling Galahad up to his feet before Galahad can even think to protest, much like he would with one of his own recalcitrant children.

“If you’ve torn my bloody stitches open, I’ll tan your hide,” he tells Galahad, gripping the omega tight by the arms and giving him a single stern shake. “The Briton  _ medicus  _ here can’t sew for shit.”

Galahad brings Tristan’s dagger back to his chest again, seeming to be too startled to resist when Bors turns him abruptly back in the direction of the fort and their beds. Towards  _ warmth. _ “You didn’t have to come after me.”

“Yes, we did,” says Gawain as he lifts the torch to begin guiding them all home, deciding to ignore the stupidity of Galahad’s comment in acknowledgement of his bereavement. “And we’ll be with you again after we’ve all had some sleep. We’ll find him.”

“In the  _ morning _ ,” Bors adds with a much more obvious undercurrent of dark muttering, snatching up Galahad’s torch from the ground as well. Eying Galahad with the clear message that he will  _ kick  _ Galahad ahead of him all the way home if the younger knight doesn’t get moving, and giving Galahad a push to start him off. “Can’t even see far enough to  _ piss  _ at the moment. You’re worse than my brats.”

“Give them a few years and I’m sure they’ll turn out equally as delightful,” Gawain says as Galahad stumbles into motion beside him, barking a laugh at Bors’ look of open dismay. Their beds are still a long cold and uncomfortable walk away, but Gawain’s heart has been lightened just enough now to carry him there.

At least he and Bors have done the good work of retrieving at least  _ one  _ brother from this place of darkness, cold and woe, so the souls of their fallen brothers will rest a little easier tonight as well.

“Cheer up,” Gawain says when Bors only continues to complain, the other alpha knight stomping along and rubbing his cold arms like he  _ doesn’t  _ have stitches to worry about, “they could have worse role models. They could, after all, take after  _ you. _ ”


End file.
